1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates generally to computers, and more particularly, for full exploitation of parallel processors for data processing in a computing environment.
2. Description of the Related Art
In today's society, computer systems are commonplace. Computer systems may be found in the workplace, at home, or at school. Computer systems may include data storage systems, or disk storage systems, to process and store data. Large amounts of data have to be processed daily and the current trend suggests that these amounts will continue being ever-increasing in the foreseeable future. An efficient way to alleviate the problem is by using deduplication. The idea underlying a deduplication system is to exploit the fact that large parts of the available data is copied again and again and forwarded without any change, by locating repeated data and storing only its first occurrence. Subsequent copies are replaced with pointers to the stored occurrence, which significantly reduces the storage requirements if the data is indeed repetitive. Processing very large amounts of information is a key problem to solve, and therefore, a need exists to improve the processing, for example by using a set of processors working in parallel. In certain applications, the set of processors can be assigned to perform some task in several stages or layers, and the task can repeatedly be split into sub-tasks in a hierarchical way. The performance of the system ultimately depends on the layout of how exactly the processors are assigned to their sub-tasks, therefore a need exists for improved processor layout for hierarchical parallel computations.